


complementing cogs & gears

by MaryPSue



Category: Crimson Peak (2015), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: (sort of? it's complicated), Amnesia, Character Study, F/M, Loss of Identity, Odin (Marvel)'s A+ Parenting, Oh the dramatic irony, Sibling Incest, not exactly a fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-23 06:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23074015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: Thomas and Lucille Sharpe acquire a mysterious benefactor....or, the AU in which Sir Thomas Sharpe is also somehow Loki, but with a twist.
Relationships: Lucille Sharpe/Thomas Sharpe
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	complementing cogs & gears

**Author's Note:**

> I challenged myself to write some popular tropes for Crimson Peak. The first one ([who manifest their presences by shadows](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22637926)) was ‘OFC descendant of Edith and Thomas’. This one’s ‘MCU crossover via Hiddleston’. While I was trying to come up with ideas for how I’d handle that premise, it kind of morphed into a Thomas and Lucille character study. I don’t think I’ve said anything here about their personalities that wouldn’t work with movie canon. 
> 
> “but Mary, how is this timeline supposed to -” shh, it’s an AU, it’s fine, it’s definitely fine, please join me in joyous contemplation of the possibilities presented by Edwardian Jane Foster.
> 
> All apologies to Neil Gaiman for the alias and anything else I might have shamelessly stolen from _American Gods_. 
> 
> Title is from Astronautalis’ “The Wondersmith and His Sons”.

Thomas Sharpe was at his wits’ end when he met the man who called himself Wednesday.

He’d just been turned aside by the last group of London investors he’d managed to beg an audience from. He’d been trying not to surrender to despair, but – despair had certainly besieged him. It was a bitter thing, to wear a title and bear the heavy responsibilities of family name and estate upon his shoulders, when all they brought with them were scandal, debt, and hardship.

Thomas had done what he could with the legacy he’d been left, exhausted all his cleverness and wrung blood from every stone, but there was only so much even cleverness could do. At least their father’s gambling debts were at last paid, but all Thomas’ grand plans to elevate the name of Sharpe from the mire of its past were as naught without the resources – without the _money_ – to make a start.

And Thomas could not return to Allerdale empty-handed. He could not face the prospect of losing the only place he’d ever called home.

Could not face _Lucille_. Could not tell her he’d failed.

He’d been two drinks deep at his father’s old club and, in his black humour, entertaining the idea of proposing to rich Upton’s sickly daughter – she’d seemed smitten, and her father had, too, with Thomas’ title if not his business; the marriage could not last too terribly long, with Pamela’s condition; and her fortune could keep things running at Allerdale for years; surely someday, somehow, Lucille would forgive him – when the man had settled down in the armchair opposite Thomas and asked, “Pardon the intrusion, but are you not Captain Sharpe’s son?”

The man who called himself Mr. Wednesday was a powerfully-built older gentleman with regal bearing and one gimlet eye. The other, he said, had been lost in the course of his military service, during which he claimed to have met Thomas and Lucille’s father. Even the simple dark patch he wore to conceal the injury looked as expensively cut as his slightly old-fashioned suit. There was something about his face that seemed familiar to Thomas, though he could not quite place it.

Once the introductions had been made and the niceties dispensed with, Mr. Wednesday had come directly to his point. He had heard about Thomas’ petition for investors, and wanted in. The deal he proposed was simple. He would purchase a half-share in the mines, in Thomas’ invention, in the estate. In return, Thomas could go to him if ever in need of capital.

There were clauses and caveats to be considered, of course, regular reports on the state of the invention’s development and the mines, conditions of sale of shares, voting rights and dividends, since Thomas had insisted on a formal contract, rather than the kind of gentlemen’s agreement that had helped to get his father into such trouble. But all of that was a matter of formalities.

What it _meant_ was that Thomas and Lucille need no longer worry about money.

Thomas wasn’t blind. He could see that there were subtle inconsistencies in the man’s story, things about which Mr. Wednesday had carefully avoided speaking or offering much detail. That his arrival in Thomas’ life was suspiciously convenient. That ‘Wednesday’ was unlikely to be his true name.

However, Thomas also knew that he was in no position to examine this stroke of good fortune too closely. And he had his own secrets to conceal.

So they’d parted with a handshake, and an exchange of correspondence addresses, and an unspoken mutual agreement not to ask too many questions.

…

The man who called himself Wednesday became the first overnight guest Allerdale Hall had hosted since Thomas was sent to school.

Thomas took the carriage to the next town to meet him at the station, while Lucille prepared a room, arranged a dinner, and launched a valiant but doomed campaign against Allerdale Hall’s decay and dust.

Standing in the main hall, dustrag in one hand, looking around at the insurmountable task she had set for herself, Lucille let herself, for a moment, give in to the fancy that seemed to have taken hold of Thomas. She allowed herself to picture Thomas’ invention rattling and roaring outside, carrying red gold up from the ground once more. The roof repaired, the foundations shored up, the windows resealed to keep out the bitter winter winds. A small army of staff, hers to command. Allerdale’s floors polished and shining, its dark wood cleaned and varnished and gleaming, its walls scrubbed and patched and repapered, its velvet hangings and tapestries beaten and aired and mended, glowing in all the rich colours of rare and precious dyes and glittering with golden threads. A fire roaring in each grate and green things growing once more in the lawn and gardens, clear crystal water pouring through the fountain her father had always intended to install at the centre of the drive, gilding gleaming on the arches so far overhead –

Lucille blinked the images away. She had nothing to gain by letting her fancies run away with her so. And if she let thoughts of what could be – and what could never be – blind her, the way Thomas seemed to have done, she stood to lose what little she did still possess. Allerdale Hall was hers. Theirs. Lucille could be content.

Still, looking around at the hall crumbling around her, Lucille was struck suddenly by an unfamiliar but near-overwhelming flood of disgust and despair. They quickly transmuted to a more familiar anger, a simmering resentment of the position their father had forced her and Thomas into, but somehow, it still left Lucille feeling hollow. What good did her anger do her now? Their father was dead, their mother too, and Allerdale Hall the best of what they’d left behind them. Thomas and Lucille’s birthright, their fortune, their future, all were tied up inextricably in these decaying walls. A wretched sort of honour, but nevertheless, a binding one.

Rulers of their own little kingdom of ruin.

They had driven it into her, at the institution, that she ought to work rather than dwell. Idle hands were, after all, the devil’s playthings. Lucille did what she could with the entrance. The dining room, unfortunately, was a lost cause. The chimney had crumbled, after all those long years exposed to the weather and the nesting crows, collapsing into the room’s vast fireplace. The whole back wall was little more now than a tumbled heap of broken brick, exposing the long, elegant room to the icy Cumberland air. Lucille hoped that their guest would not object to the familiarity of an informal dinner in the parlour.

She heard the carriage wheels trundling along the drive as she was attempting, halfheartedly, to sweep dead leaves and debris from the floor under the hole in the roof. Lucille gladly abandoned her task, stowing the broom behind one of the hangings and brushed down the front of her dress before starting for the door.

She stepped out just as the carriage drew level with the door. From the driver’s seat, Thomas caught her gaze and smiled back, wide and earnest, handing off the reins to faithful old Billy without taking his eyes from Lucille’s face.

“Welcome back, Sir Thomas,” Billy greeted them, taking the reins with an absent-minded pat to the nose of one of the horses. “And who’s this you’ve brought with you?”

“Billy, Mr. Wednesday is my guest. An old friend of Father’s and a possible business partner,” Thomas said, with one last, darting glance towards Lucille before he turned his attention to the aforementioned guest, offering an arm to help him down. The man, Lucille noticed, carried an elaborate gold-topped cane, though the way he alighted seemed to indicate that he carried it more for the sake of appearances than out of necessity. Combined with the dark patch he wore over one eye, the impression it gave was faintly piratical. Lucille caught herself wondering if the cane concealed a sword.

“Billy has been our stablehand and groundskeeper since time immemorial,” Thomas was explaining, as he pulled down the man called Wednesday’s trunk from the back of the carriage, indulging in his old nervous habit of loquaciousness. His guest, Lucille observed, did not appear to be paying any particular attention. She wondered whether Thomas had allowed him a word in edgewise the entire journey. “He’s as much a fixture of the estate as the manor house is.”

“Well, it’s a pleasure indeed,” Billy said, doffing his cap to Thomas’ guest with every sign of genuine deference, before clicking his tongue in his mouth and starting to lead the team away. Lucille caught no trace of recognition in his face when he laid eyes on their guest, and he did not so much as smile or offer a companionable greeting, as she had seen him do countless times when Thomas was very young and their father still sometimes played the host to his friends.

Those ‘friends’ had thinned considerably as the debts had mounted. And those who did still come to the hall, Lucille recalled, had often been less than welcome.

She felt eyes upon her, and looked up, only to find that she might more correctly have said that she felt _an_ eye upon her. Thomas’ guest was watching her, and Lucille realised, with a little chill, that it was the same sort of intent, thoughtful gaze that she herself had turned on old Billy only moments before. She forced herself to shake off the prickling feeling of being watched as she descended the steps, one arm extended in greeting.

“My sister, Lucille,” Thomas said, somewhere to the right of his guest. “Lucille, this is Mr. Wednesday. Our mysterious benefactor.”

Lucille and the man who called himself Wednesday both ignored him.

Lucille found she dared not take her eyes from that of the man called Wednesday, feeling a little like some small creature transfixed in the gaze of a cobra. It was not an experience she’d had since she had been very young, and it was one that she did not, Lucille decided, particularly like. Most people seemed rather to see _her_ as the cobra. As well they might. Most people, if Lucille was any judge – and she was – did not possess, could not even imagine, whatever quality it was that made one capable of killing in cold blood.

Something told her, however, that the man before her was at least as familiar with that quality as she herself was.

The man who called himself Wednesday had an extraordinary gaze, somehow. Though he wore, as Lucille had noticed, a smart black patch covering what she expected were the ruins of one eye, she still had the distinct feeling that he saw more with his sole remaining eye than many people saw with two. The uncovered eye glittered strangely, in a way that made her think of stars in clear winter skies. There was something in it that reminded her of someone, but Lucille found she could not place who.

His grip was surprisingly powerful for a man of his apparent age, his hands large enough that one all but enveloped Lucille’s completely and, for all that they were manicured and well-cared for, rough with callouses and scar tissue. He stood for a moment with Lucille’s hand in his as though he had forgotten he had it, studying Lucille’s face as though comparing it, mentally, to some other image.

Lucille stared back, chin raised, trying not to blink. Trying to convey, without a word, that he would find in her no helpless victim. That she would relinquish nothing that was hers – her home, her brother, her _life_ – without a fight.

And then the man called Wednesday smiled, broad and a little unnerving, and brought Lucille’s hand up to brush his lips against her knuckles. He only broke eye contact for a moment, that gimlet gaze fixing on the red of Lucille’s ring just before he released her and drew back.

“I’ve heard quite a lot about you,” he said, with the faintest tilt of his head and quirk of his smile that Lucille felt, suddenly, sharply, mocked her. “A pleasure to meet you at last.”

From the depths of her reserves, Lucille managed to summon something that, she hoped, resembled a smile.

“The pleasure is mine,” she repeated, stiffly, by rote. “I’ve made you up a room. If you’ll follow me.”

She didn’t wait for any acknowledgment, didn’t pause to see if either of the others were following, before she turned her back, gathered her skirts, and started back up the stairs.

She could feel the man called Wednesday’s gaze boring into her back, and had to force herself not to turn around.

…

“He’s not who he says he is.”

Thomas turned, to see Lucille standing behind the settee. He hadn’t heard her come into the parlour. She could move so quickly, invisibly, and silently through the house that, some days, he could almost swear she walked through walls.

“I hope you haven’t made this accusation to his face,” Thomas said. There was, unfortunately, no need to ask who Lucille meant. “How do you know?”

Lucille trailed her fingers along the back of the settee as she rounded it, drawing closer to Thomas’ seat by the fire. “He’s no old friend of our father’s – at least, not a close one, not anywhere near as close as he’s claimed. He hasn’t been a guest here before. He doesn’t know the halls, the tap running red surprised him, Billy doesn’t remember him -”

“To be fair, it’s been decades since Father had guests, and to see your taps gush blood would shock anyone used to city plumbing,” Thomas argued. “And Billy is hardly a reliable source of intelligence.”

“Billy was here long before either of us were born -”

“Which makes him an old man, Lucille. His eyesight is failing. As, I fear, are his wits.”

Lucille’s hand tightened on the back of the settee, her rigid posture turning even stiffer. “He knew all of Father’s friends – and creditors – by face and name.”

“ _Knew_.”

Lucille shook her head, crossing in front of the fireplace in a rustle of skirts. “Why are you so willing to turn a blind eye?”

Thomas rose to meet her in the centre of the room, under the watchful eye of their mother’s portrait. “I could ask something the same of you. He intends to help us. Why are you so determined not to trust him? What is there to be suspicious of?”

“Everything. This man could take us for everything we have left. This man could ruin us.” Lucille’s gaze was piercing, her eyes darting over Thomas’ face before she took a step back, shaking her head in apparent disbelief. “Yet you _want_ to believe him. Why?”

Thomas opened his mouth to answer her back, but found, to his chagrin, that he had no ready answer. “…because this is our last, best chance.”

Lucille’s voice was acerbic and razor sharp. “Don’t presume to lie to _me_ , Thomas.”

“I’m not. It’s true.” And it was. Thomas had never been able to lie to Lucille, any more than she could to him. Oh, he could speak the words. But for all his tricks, his skill with words, his way with people – Lucille always saw straight through him. She seemed at times to follow Thomas’ thoughts better than even he did.

He spoke the truth. But also – Thomas found he could not entirely explain it. He didn’t want this to be a trick. He only wanted –

Perhaps it was the greatest foolishness he’d ever indulged, but – it almost felt as though, at last, someone truly cared. For him. Even for _Lucille_. Wanted to protect them from the harsh realities of the world. Wednesday’s investment would mean that someone believed in what Thomas was doing, believed in his abilities and wanted to watch him succeed. To _help_ him succeed.

Thomas could no more turn his back on that than he could fly.

“Lucille, _please_. Don’t try to sabotage this -”

“ _Sabotage?_ ”

“We can ill afford to question him!”

“We can ill afford _not_ to!”

“Please,” Thomas repeated, not entirely certain of his own meaning, searching Lucille’s face for any trace of – sympathy, perhaps, or doubt of her own conviction. “Please, Lucille. This time, can’t we just be happy?”

There was something sad in Lucille’s eyes, as though it pained her to speak the barbed words which fell from her lips as much as it pained Thomas to hear them. Perhaps _because_ it pained Thomas to hear them. “Do you truly believe that the truth cannot hurt us if we merely do not _know_?”

Thomas let out a long breath, forcing himself to unclench the fists his hands had curled into without his knowledge.

He had to look away, could not meet Lucille’s eyes. “Damn you.”

Lucille’s gaze softened, and she reached up, placing a hand both comforting and warning on Thomas’ arm. He still couldn’t meet her eyes, kept his gaze fixed on the floor as she leaned in close, breathing words barely louder than a whisper directly into his ear.

“Ask him, Thomas. About Father. I will be very surprised if he can answer.”

With that, Lucille turned and swept from the parlour, leaving a shadow of her warmth to taunt Thomas with her absence.

The train of her skirt had barely vanished around the door when Mr. Wednesday entered, cane tapping conspicuously against the stone floor, cocking an eyebrow curiously in Thomas’ direction. Thomas drew in a breath, arranging his expression into a sheepish smile, stuffing down the smouldering flare of anger – and, yes, he could not help but admit, desire – that Lucille had so skillfully stoked. “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

“Oh, I heard nothing,” Mr. Wednesday graciously lied, though that patient, curious expression did not leave his face, clearly waiting for Thomas to offer an explanation.

Thomas did not offer an explanation. Instead, he turned to the fire, taking up the poker and giving it a stir as he shook his head. The little flames were barely warm against his face. Allerdale Hall was always so cold. “I’m afraid Lucille and I…do not always see eye to eye.”

Mr. Wednesday’s voice grew a little distant. “What siblings do?” It sounded less like a question and more like an admission of defeat.

“Have you any?”

“…Brothers. Long gone now.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” Thomas stabbed at a log, which crumbled in two, before setting the poker back in its rightful place beside the hearth and turning back to his guest, his smile finally seamless. “Is there anything you need? Is your room quite warm enough?”

“Compared to some of the climes I’ve campaigned in, this is balmy.” Mr. Wednesday skewered Thomas with that surprisingly shrewd stare, the one that always made Thomas feel as though something more was being said than what was spoken. “It doesn’t bother _you_ , living in this freezing old pile?”

Thomas met the challenge, both spoken and unspoken, with his blandest, most inoffensive smile. “The Sharpes are hardy Cumberland stock. Lucille and I were born for the cold. I dare say we hardly even feel it anymore.”

Mr. Wednesday’s stare seemed, quite clearly, to see Thomas’ smile for the falsehood it was. Still, Thomas didn’t let it drop. He didn’t know, after all, what hidden meaning might lie behind Mr. Wednesday’s words. And wanting to believe the man didn’t mean that he _did_ believe. Or that he need be foolhardy about it.

If the man called Wednesday truly had an innocent business deal in his thoughts and Thomas and Lucille’s best interests at heart, then it would harm no one for Thomas to probe his intentions, his past, a little farther. And perhaps he would find something to prove Lucille wrong. Perhaps – perhaps, unbelievable as the idea might be, all truly _was_ as it seemed.

“You mention visiting colder climes,” he said, crossing the room to join his guest nearer the door. “Would that have been with our father? He always insinuated that he had some great adventures in Russia, but I don’t believe he ever related more than one or two tales to us.” Thomas let his smile turn conspiratorial. “I’d be very interested to hear what sorts of exploits he got up to.”

Mr. Wednesday returned the smile, just as conspiratorial, and, Thomas suspected, just as false. “Whatever adventures your father may have had in Russia, I regret to say I had no part in them. I spent a great deal of my career in Scandinavia. You wouldn’t expect it from the name, but Iceland’s very beautiful.” It was hard to tell, what with the patch, but Thomas was reasonably certain that was a wink and not merely a blink. “And if it’s youthful exploits you’re interested in hearing about…well, it provided ample opportunity for a few of those, as well. Why don’t I regale you while we walk down and you show me this fine invention of yours in action?”

…

Lucille waited until she heard the door shut behind Thomas and his guest before she made her way up to the man called Wednesday’s room.

She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, only that she felt certain she would know it when she found it. Just as liars had their tells, so too must confidence men have their trappings. After all, a one-eyed man was so easy to pick out in a crowd – but anyone could wear an eyepatch. It would be an easy affectation to discard, if the police were looking for a man with one eye. And who, looking at the man in the eyepatch, would remember any other details of his face?

Well, Lucille would.

She could not help but recall how Thomas had looked when he’d told her of the deal he was to strike, when he’d asked her to help him look over the terms. Lucille had watched him, his bright false smile, his hung head, the slouch of his shoulders, and briefly, brightly, hated this man she’d never met. Her brother – her perfect _Thomas_ – should never have to crawl to anyone so. Should never have cause to become so cowed. So defeated.

Lucille had already had cause to hate the aristocrats and industrialists who had turned her brother down. Thomas was better than the lot of them put together, cleverer and more creative and far more driven. Lucille would be the first to admit that she little understood his invention and cared less, but even she could see the skill and effort that bringing it even thus far had required, could see the promise it held for the future. But that pack of indolent leeches, it seemed, could see no farther than the tips of their own noses.

It always astonished Lucille that Thomas could restrain his temper when they treated him like dirt on their heels, could smile and smile and laugh it away and maintain a friendship, or at least civility, for the sake of the future. Even when she was infuriated with him, even when she scorned him for lacking the spine to stand up for himself, even when she wished she could walk amongst their peers as the man he was and act as Thomas had never been man enough to, Lucille could not help but be impressed by, even a little envious of, Thomas’ ability to so completely mask what he was truly thinking.

It was a skill Lucille had never quite mastered, and one which she suspected she never would.

She had already had cause to hate those who had turned Thomas down. But, Lucille found, the one who had accepted his proposal was worse by far. There was something the man called Wednesday was hiding, something that, for whatever reason, Thomas refused to see. Something that Lucille knew by instinct could only spell disaster for the Sharpes. It had not been her experience that anything good ever came of other people’s secrets.

There was very little Lucille would not do for Thomas’ sake. If, indeed, there were anything at all.

The man who called himself Wednesday had brought a single trunk with him, a heavy steamer bound in brass. It was locked, with what Lucille considered an unnecessarily ostentatious lock. She immediately set about searching the room for the key, though she had a sinking suspicion that the man had kept it on his person, against just what Lucille now sought to do.

As far as she was concerned, that laid another strike against him.

Lucille did not find the key. What little she did find did not help her overmuch, either, except to make her suspicions mount. No billfold, no visiting cards, no address book, no stray correspondence. Not even a hat or gloves. No evidence to indicate that the man outside was anyone.

Nothing to indicate that he even existed.

…

“I take it that your sister does not trust easily.”

Thomas gave the lever an enormous heave, and the whipping belt of his machine rattled slowly to a stop. He stepped back, brushing off his hands against each other. “Lucille, I’m afraid, does not trust at all.” He turned back to the framework of his invention, perhaps a little too obviously eager to find another subject of conversation. “As you can see, I haven’t yet got sufficient torque to make the machine practical for digging use, but I’m positive that with the addition of more leverage – and with better materials to prevent the kind of breakage you unfortunately saw demonstrated -”

“It’s a very impressive model,” Mr. Wednesday interrupted, and Thomas bit his lip.

“It should be more than merely a model. It would be up and running by now if I had secured investors in London.” Thomas smoothed down the front of his jacket, managing a weak smile. “Before the mine collapse, we did also refine the clay for brickmaking on the premises. It would be the work of – a day, at most, to have the vats back in operation. I must warn you, the foundation’s not entirely stable, but if you’d like to see -”

“Are you really content here, then?” Mr. Wednesday interrupted, again, and Thomas bit off the rest of his slightly desperate bid to turn the conversation once more to business matters. “Your venture only seems to grow in ambition at each turn. And your father was an ambitious man -”

“My _father_ …” Thomas paused, considering his words carefully. “Was a thrillseeker. I flatter myself to think that I’ve learned caution and prudence from his example.”

Mr. Wednesday’s eyebrows rose, and Thomas suspected he had heard the unspoken _his bad example_. Thomas deliberately did not acknowledge it.

“It’s not fame and fortune I desire, anyway,” he said, turning back towards the house. “Only the means for a comfortable life and to alleviate our worries about the hall.” He glanced back at his invention, at the snapped cord that now hung slack, buckets dangling, mentally calculating the cost of the repair.

“Of course,” Mr. Wednesday echoed, and Thomas fancied that there was a note of – derision, perhaps, or disbelief – in his words. “Only a comfortable life at Allerdale Hall.”

Before he could stop himself, Thomas heard himself adding, “And perhaps – a little recognition.”

Mr. Wednesday had, Thomas realised, a way of listening that seemed calculated to draw more words out of the speaker. He seemed somehow to create a silence around himself, a silence Thomas found he wanted to fill. And, though his cool, measured gaze did not seem to carry any judgment, Mr. Wednesday gave enough of a sense of careful consideration that Thomas also felt compelled to explain himself – or, at least, to try.

“So much has gone into this venture, so much depends upon it, it would open so many opportunities,” he said, feeling a little desperate, a little pathetic, and yet, the words still spilled forth. “Not only for Lucille and me. The entire region would benefit from seeing the mines in operation again. But people are still so shy of speculative investment, even now. And so many prospective investors seem to see nothing more in this than – a spoiled boy, amusing himself with elaborate clockwork toys at others’ expense.”

“Some would say that the creation of a new type of machinery is an undertaking better left to those with experience,” Mr. Wednesday said.

“If it is experience you wish to see demonstrated, it would be my pleasure to show you my workshop,” Thomas said, the words sounding a little arch even to his own ears. “Perhaps there is a certain joy to be found in solving the puzzles of cogs and belts and wheels, but then, should I not take pride in my accomplishments? This invention is as much the child of my mind as – as Minerva from the forehead of Jupiter. It is my own blood, sweat, and tears that have oiled these cogs. I have laboured long and hard to acquire an understanding of mechanical principles, and further, the skills necessary to put them into action. Just because a – a club of old toffs fail to appreciate the beauty of a well-worked mechanism -”

Thomas stopped, abruptly aware, as he took in the knowing smile that Mr. Wednesday turned upon him, that he’d given too much away.

“You’re something of a chameleon, are you not?”

“I don’t follow your meaning,” Thomas said, stung, a little more sharply than he’d intended.

“Only that, when you presented to the peers in London, there was none of the mechanical. You spoke mostly of the economic opportunities, your desire to preserve the proud tradition of your home and carry it forth into a bright and promising future…but for me, an apparent industrialist with no title -”

“Would you call me a liar, sir?”

Mr. Wednesday’s smile did not falter. If anything, it grew obliquely amused. “Only a diplomat born.”

Thomas, unsure of how to respond, turned his eyes up toward the face of the house. Up in the window on the second floor hall, he thought he caught a flicker of movement, the shifting of some shadow. Lucille. That was curious. She ventured there only rarely – the rooms in that wing were mostly empty, they had long been kept for –

Visitors.

“I can’t show you much of the mines,” Thomas said, quickly, turning back to their guest, who was watching him with the detached interest of a spectator at a croquet game. “Seeing as they’ve collapsed. But may I at least show you the land, so that you might have an idea of their extent?”

The look Mr. Wednesday fixed on Thomas seemed to see a little too much of Thomas’ true intent. But all he said was, “Lead on.”

…

Lucille took the elevator down to the kitchen, where she rummaged through drawers until she found what she sought. She took the long, thin fileting knife back upstairs with her, concealed in her skirts, and slipped back into the man called Wednesday’s room.

Lucille shut the door carefully behind her, just in case. She had little fear of the room’s occupant returning and surprising her, though. She’d seen, through the hall window, Thomas leading his guest around the east wing, through the ruined wall, out towards the dried-out husk of the hedge maze. Little doubt that Thomas had said he’d show the man the extent of the mines. He’d taken the long way, though. Lucille had a little time.

She wasted none of it in pulling down the stranger’s trunk and inserting the narrow blade of the knife into its lock. Lucille had had plenty of practice picking the lock on her father’s liquor cabinet, after he’d begun to suspect the tea, before he’d grown too weak and his mind too blurry to remember to lock it or where he’d put the key. Lucille knew how to leave no trace.

She’d slipped two of the pins and was working on the third when a horrible noise at the window startled her. Lucille flew to her feet, knife at the ready – but it was nothing but an enormous black bird, a crow or perhaps a raven, flapping against the pane and knocking on the glass with its curved black bill.

Lucille took a breath, trying to calm her jangled nerves. Lock-picking required a steady hand, which hers would not be unless she could control herself.

“Rotten thing,” she muttered to herself, starting toward the window with her knife still in hand. The bird fixed her with one beady black eye, letting out a low, strangled, coughing sort of croak, and then flapped up and away over the roof. Lucille hoped it wouldn’t find the hole in that roof. It had seemed a little too interested in what went on within the hall. The last thing Allerdale needed was an infestation of corvids.

Lucille turned back to the trunk and her interrupted work, but something about the bird’s sudden appearance had rattled her. Her knife slipped from the lock three times as she grappled with the final pin, sharply scraping the lock and leaving a glinting, hairline scratch across its face. She finally had to draw a pin from her hair and use it along with the knife to get the lock to spring.

The whole time, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling of being watched.

When she finally got the lid of the trunk open, its contents, Lucille was disappointed to find, were startlingly ordinary. Another grey wool suit; a few carefully folded shirts; several pairs of skilfully-darned socks; a shapeless, broad-brimmed felt hat.

And, folded in the bottom of the trunk, a yellowing square of newsprint.

Lucille found herself curiously reluctant to touch it. As though, if she laid hands on it, it would somehow become real. As though it could not harm her if she turned away and pretended she hadn’t seen, pretended she didn’t already know, already dread, what she would find when she unfolded it.

Foolishness. Lucille knew better than anyone that truth was a poison. That not to see it, not to know its presence, was a death sentence.

She caught up the cutting and pulled it open before her nerve failed her.

Lucille had expected it. And yet, she still did not know how to feel when she saw her own crime unfolded before her.

She’d never seen the papers, after. She’d been shuttled off to the institution so quickly and quietly that she’d never had a chance. She was under no illusions that anyone had meant to protect her from their contents. They had merely wanted her dealt with. Safely sequestered somewhere she could do no further harm.

The woodcut illustration filled the top of the page, in all its gruesome glory. The headline screamed about murder most foul, the body of the article casting the most slanderous aspersions. It was almost a relief – and yet, somehow, still an insult – to see that it was nothing but a lot of sensational trash.

It had been so much simpler than all that, really. And yet, also, so much more complex. Love – and death – always were.

At last, Lucille managed to tear her eyes from the words spilling across the page. She was dizzily aware that time had passed, that she had lost track of how much. Hastily, she refolded the newspaper cutting and placed it back in the trunk, stacking the man called Wednesday’s things back into place atop it and closing the lid.

The lock protested, briefly, but at last clicked back into place.

…

“What caused the collapse?”

Thomas looked out over the indent in the hillside behind the hall. It looked like nothing so much as though it had been struck by a giant’s hammer, a huge, deceptively soft, vaguely circular crater grown over with wild yellow grasses crumpling in the backside of the hill.

“Our father always blamed a meteorite strike, if you can believe it,” he said, with half a laugh to show how absurd he thought the excuse, without outright insulting the late Captain Sharpe to the face of a man who claimed to be his great friend. “I was never certain if it was the same one he said put the hole in the hall’s roof. Though I doubt any act of God or man would have done as much damage had the tunnels been more prudently planned. And better shored. There were corners cut, towards the end. We had debts.”

His companion made no remark, for long enough that Thomas caught himself worrying at the skin around his thumb with his nails, a bad old nervous habit. It would not, he knew, be entirely untruthful to say that the Sharpes still had debts. The risk was still present that greed or necessity would push them to make rash decisions. That another such disaster might cause the loss of the mines altogether.

But when Mr. Wednesday spoke, it was not anything Thomas had expected to hear. “Did they ever recover the meteorite?”

“It was – only a fancy of my father’s,” Thomas said, caught off his guard. “If there were ever such a thing, what remained of the mines would have been too unstable, it would have been too dangerous, to try to recover it.” He turned his eyes down towards the scuffed toes of his shoes, spattered with the indelible stains of red clay. “Even then, I don’t think there were many who believed it existed. But something had to be said. As you may imagine, the Sharpes were not well liked in the village after the collapse. Good men lost their lives.”

“How old were you?”

Thomas shook his head. “It was very near the date of my birth. Lucille might remember more, though she wasn’t much older. Why do you ask?”

Mr. Wednesday’s stare was like a pin, transfixing Thomas like a butterfly to a piece of card. He said nothing for another long moment, only leaning heavily against that gold-topped cane and studying Thomas as though trying to memorise his face, or perhaps classify it according to some inscrutable taxonomy.

Then he straightened, with a sigh. “The iron ore one can smelt from a meteorite is some of the purest and finest available on Earth. And they are in some demand as curios. You could stand to make a small profit if you were to turn it up in your digging.” He waved a hand vaguely towards the indent in the hill. “And even if the whole is no longer present, there may yet be fragments remaining.”

He seemed to speak more to himself than Thomas as he said, looking back out over the crater, “When something falls so far and strikes so hard, sometimes it shatters.”

Thomas, at a loss for how to respond, finally decided not to.

“I’m still working on a scaffolding system to support the machine on this treacherous ground,” he said, hoping to bring the conversation back onto a topic that felt less like the collapsed mine itself, with unseen pitfalls hidden beneath every seemingly innocent word. “I’ve not had a chance yet to build a prototype, but I’ve drawn up some plans. It’s growing rather chilly out here. I could ask Lucille to make us a pot of tea and we could look them over in the parlour by the fire?”

The grin Mr. Wednesday turned on him was surprisingly lupine. “I’ll take no tea from your sister, thank you. But I wouldn’t say no to a fire.”

…

All that evening, Lucille watched.

Thomas’ guest seemed genuinely curious about the plans Thomas spread out across the parlour, asking intelligent questions that did, at least, seem to demonstrate a business interest. However, Lucille noticed, he refused tea the first time she offered, and did not touch the pot she left between him and Thomas. Perversely, wanting to test how far he would dare press the limits of politeness, she poured him a cup and left it at his elbow. When, hours later, she brought in dinner, it remained untouched.

Their father’s death had been put down to heart failure brought on by an excess of drink, in the end. Their mother had taken a hatchet to the head, hardly a discreet method of murder. There was no reason for the man who called himself Wednesday to suspect poison.

Unless he _knew_.

Lucille gently tried to turn the conversation, over dinner, towards the man called Wednesday’s other investments and projects, but she had not Thomas’ way with words. She’d long envied him the skill. The very language seemed to twist into any shape he chose, to shimmer and sparkle off his tongue, to enchant those who heard him into acceptance as though he were working some fairy-tale spell. As though he were weaving a net in which to capture their hearts and minds from thin air and fancy. She’d been astonished that no investor had shown interest in their venture. Thomas had such a way with words. Lucille could only imagine that they must all have been deaf.

Unfortunately, words always seemed to turn to lead on Lucille’s tongue, or to slide sideways to reveal too much of the adder lurking behind them, poised to sting. Thomas himself stopped her before she could pursue her line of inquiry to any kind of conclusion. Lucille bit back the anger that flared at the interruption, masking it behind perfect impassivity. She trusted Thomas. He would understand.

And, indeed, after several minutes of frivolous chatter, in which Lucille took little part, Thomas, bless him, carefully began to turn the conversation again towards their guest’s past. With far greater delicacy than Lucille knew she could ever achieve, he followed a story from their childhood – their guest had expressed an interest in anecdotes of mischief from their youth which Lucille, already suspicious, found highly suspect – with a wistful sigh and a brief glance down towards his plate, a flicker of emotion crossing his face before he looked back up with a winning and fraudulent smile. “Forgive me. It’s – I was quite young when we lost our parents. Much of what I remember of them comes from Lucille’s stories.”

That was a lie, bald-faced and blatant. Lucille found her interest caught, and deliberately focused her attention on her food, so as not to give Thomas’ game away. Still, had she been a cat or dog, she imagined, anyone could have seen her ears prick up.

“I’ll admit to a certain selfishness on my part in inviting you here,” Thomas continued, addressing their guest. Lucille could too easily picture the look of pleading, open earnestness he would have turned upon the man called Wednesday, all sincerity. She had to struggle to contain a smile. “I had rather hoped – I mean, you and our father were friends – I hardly had a chance to know him.”

_You did_ , Lucille thought, delicately carving through the crust of the meat pie she’d made. _You knew him for the brute he was. That was all any of us needed to know._

She’d been a child, with a child’s naïve optimism. But she had hoped, once their father was dead, that their mother might lose some of her fear, her anger, her sneaking viciousness. That she might, as Lucille nursed her back to health, have learned to love Lucille, at least a little. That, without her husband’s overriding presence, she might become more like a mother.

Lucille had never expected that, with their father dead, all of their mother’s hate would come to rest solely on herself and Thomas.

“Would you, perhaps -” Thomas bit off his own sentence, and Lucille looked up just in time to see him turn away from their guest, a sad smile fixed upon his face, shaking his head ever so slightly, as if at his own folly. “No. I beg your pardon. You came here with high hopes for a promising business venture, not to reminisce about a dead man.”

Lucille chanced a glance over to their guest, and found herself unsurprised to see him regarding Thomas with a knowing look, as though Thomas were as transparent as Lucille. And yet, he only asked, “What would you have me tell you?”

Thomas shook his head. “What sort of man he was? What he was like, away from home and family? How you met, what qualities attracted you to him, made you find him worthy of friendship? I only know him by the debts he left us. It’s hardly the full measure of a man.”

“I did tell you I met your father through our service,” the man called Wednesday said, a gentle but steely reproach in his voice. Thomas blinked wide, innocent eyes into its teeth.

“Yes, but – how was he, with the men? Was he liked? Feared? What rank did he attain? Did he distinguish himself? Did he ever even see action? He hardly ever spoke of his service to us.” Another lie. Lucille knew Thomas was as familiar as she with the pistol in the study, the medals in their velvet box, the _whip_ –

The man who called himself Wednesday let out a huff that was nearly laughter. “Did he see action. Your father -” He looked carefully over Thomas’ puppyish expression, the forkful of pie forgotten in Lucille’s hand, and said, “Not to speak ill of the dead, but your father was not a man who inspired love and devotion by his generous nature and kindly mien. But he was a good officer.” He paused, again looking to Lucille before adding, “And a vicious brute.”

Rather than respond, Lucille deliberately and without breaking eye contact raised her fork to her lips.

Thomas bit down on his lower lip, turning his gaze again to his plate. “I rather feared it was so.” His smile, when he raised his head, was watery. Lucille did not know how much truth there was in it. “But surely, for there to have been friendship between you, there must have been something, some quality, for which you held him in regard?”

Lucille could not see the purpose in the question. But the man called Wednesday’s steely gaze softened, ever so slightly.

“He was an accomplished strategist,” he said. “And a fearsome warrior. A man upon whom peace was wasted. But for his skill, his determination, yes, I held a certain respect for him.”

It was strangely old-fashioned language, Lucille noticed. _Fearsome warrior_. Like something from a saga or an opera. And not, as she was concerned, a quality which one much sought in a friend. In fact, had she not known that the man called Wednesday was speaking of someone he had called friend, she would almost have thought he spoke of a deadly enemy.

And it had not escaped her notice that the man called Wednesday had avoided speaking to the particulars of their father’s service. Had he not called their father a vicious brute, Lucille thought, she might almost think he had never even met the man.

But Thomas seemed pleased enough, if the aborted attempt he made at a smile was anything by which to judge. “Thank you,” he said, quietly, as though the man called Wednesday’s words had truly affected him deeply, and then said no more.

Lucille set her fork and knife down against her plate with great care, relishing the ringing scrape of metal against china. “And our mother?”

Thomas’ eyes flicked up, under his brows, to glare at Lucille. The man who called himself Wednesday also gave her a glowering look, as though trying to work out her angle. Lucille ignored them both, keeping her face carefully schooled into blankness. “You must have known her, if you and our father were such great friends. What did you think of her?” She took up her knife and fork again, considering her pie. “And, of course, her grisly murder? You must know it remains unsolved.”

A hot, tense silence overtook the parlour. Thomas, Lucille could already tell, was furious. She could not so easily read the man called Wednesday, but she knew that he was less than pleased.

“Lucille,” Thomas said, warningly. And then, trying valiantly and in vain to capture an easy, laughing lightness, “I hardly think this is pleasant conversation for the dinner table.”

“Very little is pleasant in this house,” Lucille said, shortly, turning to the man called Wednesday. “Did you know? That she was murdered?”

The man called Wednesday, to his credit, met Lucille’s gaze without so much as a flinch. “I did.” He offered, Lucille noticed, no platitudes, no words of comfort.

“Hm,” she said, and turned back to her pie.

…

“What are you doing?”

The man called Wednesday turned, putting his back to the dying fire and the candelabra on the low table, casting his face in shadow. He was alone, before the massive fireplace in the parlour and the equally-massive portrait of the late Beatrice, Lady Sharpe which hung above it. That came as a surprise to Lucille. Watching from the doorway, in the dim silvery moonlight from the window in the library, she had half-thought she had seen two people silhouetted in the glow from the fire. It must have been only the man called Wednesday’s shadow.

Besides, the flickering second shape had seemed to Lucille, for a moment, to be that of a woman. And no other woman dwelt at Allerdale Hall.

Lucille had seen to that.

“I might ask the same of you,” the man called Wednesday said. He did not, Lucille thought, sound as surprised by her appearance as she might have expected, or indeed at all guilty. Instead, she thought she detected a trace of annoyance, as though she had been rude to interrupt his nocturnal wanderings. She could make out nothing of his expression.

Lucille raised her chin, gathering her robe close around her. Her filmy nightdress lacked the rigidity, the confinement, of her mother’s old day dresses, but it also failed to present a meaningful barrier between her and the world. It was harder to retain her composure when even her garments would not act respectably.

“It’s my home,” she said, unable to keep the note of pride from her voice. “I have every right to roam its halls at whatever hour I see fit.” Which was a good thing, because, Lucille found, she could hardly sleep without Thomas warm in her arms. She’d managed, somehow, in the institution, though she had spent the entirety of her time there on edge and restless. She felt that way again, rather like a little pale ghost, wandering the halls, searching for some lost thing to make her feel some semblance of life. “ _You_ , though, are a guest. And your wakefulness reflects poorly on me as hostess. Can I not make you something warm to drink, to lull you back to sleep?”

She couldn’t help the upward curve of her lips, the suggestion of a smirk, as she offered, “Tea?”

The man called Wednesday did not answer her.

At last, he turned back toward the fire, casting the deeply-scored lines of his face into sharp, ruddy relief. “The lock on my trunk is damaged.”

“A shame.”

“It wasn’t so when I left London.” The man called Wednesday’s single eye caught the firelight, seeming to dance with a private amusement.

Lucille met its gaze with every ounce of haughty pride she could summon. “Train stations are such hazardous places. One never knows what manner of…misfortune might befall one. You didn’t miss anything, did you?”

The man called Wednesday watched her for another long moment. Lucille watched him right back.

“You seem to speak more freely in the dark,” he observed, at last. “Or, perhaps, outside of the influence of your brother…?”

“Thomas has no hold over my tongue,” Lucille said, reflecting briefly but fondly on the uses to which Thomas _had_ , over the years, put her tongue. “ _I_ am capable of being civil. You never did answer my question. Why are you lurking in my parlour at this hour?”

The man called Wednesday’s face cracked in a grin that Lucille felt was somehow predatory.

“I’ve been conversing,” he said, with a gesture up towards the portrait of Lucille’s mother, “with this…august personage.”

Lucille looked up at the portrait. In the dimly flickering firelight, Lady Sharpe’s eyes seemed almost to dart, to shimmer with life.

“Does she listen well, then?” Lucille said, half to herself. It lacked the bite she’d meant it to have.

It had happened, more than once, that Lucille had suddenly felt the full weight of her mother’s disapproving gaze upon her in this very room, felt her watchful presence filling the silence as though, at any moment, she might clear her throat. It was an overpowering presence, and as likely, Lucille had found, to spur her on to some spiteful wickedness as to cow her into sullen silence. At such times, Lucille had hurled many bitter words at the portrait, things she wished she’d poured like poison into her mother’s ear during those long months of her convalescence, while they both were helpless to escape.

Yes, the painted Lady Sharpe listened well. Better by far than she ever had in life.

“More so than she speaks,” the man called Wednesday said. “But I believe I’ve learned what I needed from her.”

Lucille did not miss the way his eyes flicked down to her ring, glowing like a drop of blood in the firelight. She curled her hands protectively in her robe.

“Will the papers pay you well for your scandalous story of madness and murder in the backwaters of Cumberland, then?” she asked, shortly. “I assume you’ve made me the villain of the piece. Perhaps you should also imply some grotesque impropriety between Thomas and I. I’m certain that can only increase your selling price.”

The man called Wednesday gave Lucille a long, considering look.

“You never believed I was interested in investing in Thomas’ machine,” he said, at last, neatly sidestepping the question. “You never trusted me.”

Lucille shrugged. “You lied.”

“I’m no newspaperman.”

“You’re no friend of our father’s, either.”

The man called Wednesday took a moment to respond to that, his eye turning back up toward the portrait. “I would have called myself such. Once.”

Lucille looked from the man called Wednesday to the portrait and back again. A thought flicked a powdery silver wing somewhere in the depths of her mind, and she pinned it in place to examine in greater detail later.

“I may not yet know your true purpose here,” she said. “But I know what you are.”

That lupine smile returned, but Lucille caught a glimmer of genuine interest in that single eye. “Tell me, then, what am I?”

“A killer.” Lucille gathered her robe closer around her, drawing nearer to the embers of the dying fire and the shape of the man they silhouetted. “But not a fool. You must know that if you harm Thomas, in any way…it will end badly for you.”

The man called Wednesday’s good eye narrowed, half considering, half mocking, as he regarded Lucille. “’Badly’…as in, I too might find a cleaver buried in my brain?”

Lucille caught his eye, and slowly, deliberately, let the ghost of a smile spread across her own face. “Well, Mother’s murderer does remain at large.”

“So long as we understand each other,” the man called Wednesday said, genuine amusement in his voice. Lucille could make no sense of it. Unless he thought her so paltry a threat that she was little more than a joke to him.

Still, though, unless she much missed her guess, there was a certain almost wistful quality underlying his amusement, which seemed at odds with his mockery. And her threat to kill him.

Lucille glanced back up at the portrait over the mantlepiece, her pinned thought feebly waving its powdery wings.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” the man called Wednesday said, apparently without any particular malice, his stare like a brand, “that Thomas might have greater success without you? That he might be a better man, free of this crumbling wreck and its legacy of death? That you and your idea of protection might be holding him back from what he could achieve?”

So it had finally come to this, just as Lucille had known it would. It was a bitter sort of vindication.

“He used to scream when they beat me,” she said, plainly.

Lucille did not take her eyes from the portrait, but the silence that answered her told her that she had, at last, perhaps managed to shock their too-knowing, too-amused guest.

“I took the punishments to spare him. But to hear him, one would think he was the one being beaten. Even once they’d locked him in the attic so he might not see or hear,” she went on, lightly, enjoying the way she saw, from the corner of her eye, the man called Wednesday’s condescending look slowly fade. “He’d shriek his little lungs out with each lash, each blow, just as though they’d struck him as well. Nurse was quite disturbed by it. Called us uncanny. Of course, they let her go as soon as I was old enough to care for Thomas, so she hardly had to suffer us long.”

Lucille paused, contemplating the grim, disapproving set of the painted Lady Sharpe’s mouth. She’d called Lucille a cuckoo, once, too, just like this increasingly unwelcome guest of Thomas’. Called Lucille changeling, sworn that any _real_ daughter of hers should have stayed as she was as an infant, obedient and fair and easy to love.

She’d paid for that.

“He’s mine. He’s mine as surely as though I’d borne him in my body, as though we were twinned in the womb. We are all we have ever had. And we have done what we must.” Lucille straightened, under the man called Wednesday’s stare. “ _Both_ of us. Do you think Thomas blind to what happens under his own roof?”

“I think,” the man called Wednesday said, his voice deceptively soft, “that Thomas is capable of more than he himself realises, and not all of it good. But that without you to act on his behalf, he may never need discover how far he is truly willing to go.”

“You can’t separate us out so easily.” Lucille paused, and gave the man called Wednesday her most polite smile. “Thomas would not be better without me. Without me, Thomas would be _nothing_.”

She showed her teeth. It would strain credulity too far to call it a smile. “And very little comes between us for long.”

Lucille was gratified to see that all trace of amusement had been wiped from the face of Thomas’ guest.

“About that tea?” she offered, perhaps a little smug in triumph.

The man called Wednesday waved her away with a frown. His voice was flat, undercut by a darkness that Lucille could not quite place.

“I prefer mine without arsenic. Good night.”

He turned, while Lucille was still trying to find her tongue, and left the room without another word.

…

Thomas slept fitfully.

He and Lucille had both agreed that it would be best, for the single night they had a guest, for them not to be seen sharing the master bedroom. But in the small hours of the night, when the house howled like a lost soul and the huge four-poster stood cold and empty around him, Thomas caught himself regretting that decision. He hadn’t slept this badly since he’d been at school. More often than not, almost as soon as he began to drift off, he jolted awake in a panic, reaching for familiarity, for comfort, for Lucille, and finding no one there.

His dreams, when he slept, were jumbled, disoriented, frightening. Distant stars wheeled and exploded, just beyond his grasp. His mother stared disapprovingly down from her perch above the mantle with glowering red eyes, blood dripping slowly over her forehead from the knife embedded in it. A star with his sister’s face crashed through the roof of Allerdale Hall, alighting in the entryway as softly as a fallen leaf. She smiled and held out her arms, her silvery gown rustling, but when Thomas stepped forward, she was nothing but air and smoke –

He woke, at last, to watery sunlight struggling through the dirty, warped panes of the windows. The night had ended, leaving him more exhausted than he had been when he’d retired to bed.

He should, perhaps, have first attended on his guest. But instead, as soon as his morning ablutions were complete and he was dressed, Thomas sought out his sister.

Lucille, it seemed, had missed Thomas that night as much as he had missed her. She was beautiful as ever, of course – achingly, unfairly beautiful, there were days when Thomas wished nothing more than to gaze at her for hours, days when he even felt a strange, perverse envy of her feminine loveliness – but there were dull purple shadows under her eyes, dark with exhaustion, and a crease of worry in her brow. And, as soon as her eyes caught his, her face lit up with one of her rare smiles, and she eagerly abandoned the pot bubbling on the stove to throw her arms around him.

Thomas shut his eyes, for one selfish, indulgent moment, settling into Lucille’s possessive grip, pressing his face into her hair. She smelled, as ever, of something salt and sharp and human, yet also faintly metallic, like fresh blood spilled on snow. It mingled headily with the rosewater she liked to wear. Thomas breathed deeply, and felt tension he hadn’t realised he was carrying ease from his shoulders.

He was just wondering whether he were reckless enough to dare, here in the open, exposed kitchen, to brush his lips against the soft, sensitive place just behind her ear, when Lucille dug surprisingly strong fingers into his neck, holding his head in place. Her voice was low and urgent as she said, into Thomas’ ear, “He knows.”

“Knows what?” Thomas asked, too startled to modulate his voice.

“Enough. Too much.”

“About Mother?”

“Everyone who’s read a paper knows about Mother, or at least suspects. He knows about _Father_. About the arsenic. That I broke into his trunk. Most likely that I found the news clipping about Mother’s murder there. Who knows what else.”

“About this?”

Lucille’s fingers closed in Thomas’ hair, tugging just hard enough to make the roots sting. “No. I don’t think so.”

“How could he know about Father?”

“Thomas, I don’t _know_.” Lucille drew back, enough so that she could look Thomas in the eye, placing her hands on his shoulders even as he gripped her tighter around the waist. “He says he’s not a newspaperman. But it wouldn’t be the first lie he’s told.”

Thomas shook his head, even as a hollow weightlessness dropped into the pit of his stomach. There were no lies, no secrets, between him and Lucille. She might say something like this to anyone else to put a stop to some arrangement she disliked, but not him. Never him.

He'd know if she lied. He always did.

“What do we do?” Thomas asked, and hated how small, how resigned, his own voice sounded.

“There’s plenty of room in the vats below,” Lucille said, perfectly casual and perfectly cold.

“No – no.” Thomas pulled away from Lucille and collapsed into one of the wooden chairs ringed around the kitchen table, running a hand through his hair.

Lucille didn’t move, her expression frozen into disdain, as though she had been carved from ice. “It’s not as though I’ve never dirtied my hands for you before.”

“No. Don’t,” Thomas entreated her. He blew out a long breath, and was forced to admit that he had no better ideas. “At least, not until it becomes necessary.”

The small smile Lucille shot in his direction seemed to speak of a wretched sort of triumph, the hollow victory of being proven right when one really would prefer to have been wrong. Thomas felt stricken. What was he _thinking_? Lucille had already killed twice for his sake. Their own _parents_. She’d been only a child. Was he so thoroughly rotten within, that his love, that her love for him, could so completely corrupt them both?

For one single, sickening, interminable moment, Thomas could only hear their mother’s voice, her last words ringing in his ears as though she stood just behind him, whispering.

_Monsters. Both of you._

“Thomas?”

“I’ll speak with him.” Thomas straightened, stood, tried to force himself back into the present. He did his best to ignore the horrible crumbling tightness in his chest, as though his lungs were a poorly-built mineshaft tumbling into collapse. “See if…some explanation for this…perhaps he can be persuaded to keep what he thinks he knows to himself.”

“We have nothing with which to pay off a blackmailer,” Lucille reminded him, archly. “And we won’t have an opportunity like this again, him out here alone.”

Thomas started to reply, but paused, a little cool shard of a question cutting through the maelstrom of his whirling thoughts.

“Why do we have it now?”

Lucille raised an eyebrow in question. Thomas pushed stubbornly onwards, the thought unfolding before him as he did. “Why go to all this trouble, if his only intent is – is blackmail? Why this charade? Why not simply approach me at the club and ask for money? Why make the offer to invest? Why spend _any_ time here, getting to know us, trying to get close to us -”

He stopped. Lucille’s head had risen in apparent slow realisation. Her silence was deafening.

“Lucille?” Thomas asked.

Lucille did not smile, but one corner of her mouth did twist strangely. “I may have some idea.”

…

The man who called himself Wednesday looked up as Thomas made his way into the parlour, and smiled. Thomas managed a smile back, one which he hoped seemed sincere, without any strangeness in it. He wasn’t certain he’d succeeded. The man who called himself Wednesday had spoken truly when he’d called Thomas a chameleon, but – he seemed to see Thomas more clearly than many of those whom, over the years, Thomas had fooled.

He must know that Lucille would have told Thomas everything. That the game was up. There was a certain strange relief, Thomas realised, in anticipating an end to all pretenses, all careful words and guarded actions. The thought brought a genuine smile to his face as he joined the man who called himself Wednesday by the piano.

“Do you play?” he asked, more for something to say than because he was interested in the answer.

“I’m afraid not,” the man called Wednesday said. “Your sister does, though, I take it?”

“Far better than I do,” Thomas admitted, turning his gaze to the piece of sheet music the man called Wednesday had apparently been studying. “Lucille is a lady of many accomplishments. She had a convent education, as you surely know.”

“Oh, I know precisely what kind of education Lucille had,” the man called Wednesday said, with a grim sliver of a smile.

No more pretenses. “You seem to know quite a lot about us,” Thomas said, carefully, picking up the top sheet of the music arranged on the piano. It was one he hadn’t heard Lucille play for some time, a selection from Wagner’s _Ring_ cycle. He’d had the very devil of a time tracking down the music, and even then, the cost of the little luxury had given him pause. But when Lucille had seen the gift, when she’d kissed him and sat down to play – “You must have made an extensive study of us before you approached me.”

For once, the man called Wednesday did not offer a ready explanation or excuse. Instead, his single eye roved thoughtfully over Thomas’ face for a long, tense moment before he said, “She’s spoken to you.” It was not a question.

“We don’t keep secrets from one another,” Thomas said, shortly. “Who are you, really?”

He wasn’t expecting the man who called himself Wednesday to laugh.

“You would hardly believe me if I told you,” he said, apparently overmuch amused by the irony of Thomas’ question, and whatever patience had remained to Thomas evaporated.

“ _You_ might be surprised,” he said, and then, sick of cryptic words and mysteries. “Are you our true father?”

The man called Wednesday did not answer right away.

“What brought you to that conclusion?” he asked, at last, which, Thomas noted, was not a ‘no’.

Thomas carefully settled the sheet of music back into place to avoid meeting the man called Wednesday’s steady, unrelenting gaze. “There was little love between our father and mother. It’s not unheard of.” He tucked the sheaves of sheet music together, aligning their edges and corners with excessive care before lifting the lid of the piano bench to deposit them within. “Besides which, the only reasons either Lucille or I could call to mind for why a man who lied about his true identity and relationship to our family might approach us with such a magnanimous business proposition were…decidedly more unsavoury.”

He straightened, closing the piano bench with a _bang_ , feeling as though he at last held his temper in check enough to meet the man called Wednesday’s eye. “So which explains your presence here? Scandal or crime?”

The man called Wednesday’s expression was inscrutable, though Thomas thought – only for a fleeting second – that he saw a trace of fury in it. “Business. As you already know. I’ve told you nothing but the truth.”

Thomas bit down on his tongue and the sharp retort he wished to shout at the same time.

“Perhaps that’s so,” he said, quietly, after a moment’s thought, not trusting himself to raise his voice. “But that is not the same, I think, as being honest.”

“I never had an affair with the late Lady Sharpe,” the man called Wednesday said, reproachfully. Thomas noticed that the ironic, knowing note seemed at last to have left his voice, replaced by a tension Thomas knew far too well from when Lucille was in one of her moods. “You are not my blood.”

Thomas nodded, slowly. “Then this _is_ blackmail.”

It did not escape his notice that the man called Wednesday’s grip tightened on the golden head of his cane until his knuckles turned white.

“I offered my aid to you, an offer which is _more_ than generous, and this is how you repay me? With distrust and slanderous accusations?” The man called Wednesday drew a deep breath, recovering his composure. “You and your sister are well-matched. If you wish me to withdraw my offer, you need only say so. You will never hear from me again.”

A slew of additional slanderous accusations flew to the forefront of Thomas’ mind – _oh, of course, the demands for money will be delivered anonymously; not until we see the byline, I presume; no, not after you’ve satisfied yourself that we’ve nothing of worth left that you can take from us_ – but he bit them all back. He had a purpose here, he had in mind the goal of winning the man called Wednesday’s silence, and he would do well not to endanger his own chances in exchange for the momentary pleasure of giving vent to his anger.

Lucille, of course, would have given voice to all the things Thomas did not say. At least, she would have done so before the institution. Thomas saw how she chafed against the rigid self-control they had beaten into her.

It was simply that Lucille had always been the one who would do the things Thomas would only dare think. Thomas found, even when it threw his plans into turmoil, he could neither blame nor hate her for it. He pitied her, rather, and, in some miserable, envious way, admired her. Perhaps she had never had his patience, his readiness to work slow and unseen, his ability to fit himself to the expectations of others, to use their assumptions to his own ends. But she also would bear no disrespect, brook no insult, at least not unanswered. Those who dared cross Lucille knew, when her vengeance fell upon them, exactly who was the architect of their misery.

Thomas had seen her vicious satisfaction in the moment she’d buried the cleaver in their mother’s brain, and wished so badly that it was his hand around the handle of the knife that, for a moment, he could have sworn it was his own arm he felt complete the swing.

“You have no idea of the disaster you face without me,” the man called Wednesday continued, when Thomas made no reply, a note of entreaty joining the barely-suppressed anger in his voice. “Where the course of action you were considering when I met you would have led.”

A new and unanticipated fear bloomed slow and dark in the depths of Thomas’ mind. Was this the blackmail, then, that the man would go, not to the papers, but to Mr. Upton with everything he knew? But – there was no way anyone could have known that Thomas had planned to propose to Pamela – he himself had only just begun to entertain the idea.

It was a bluff. Must be. The man called Wednesday had, Thomas was forced to admit, a far better poker face than his own father had had.

“What might or might not have happened had we not met is hardly material now,” Thomas said, firmly, at last. “You wish to mortgage our future. The least you owe us in return is the truth.”

The man called Wednesday met Thomas’ eyes, as though daring Thomas to challenge him. Thomas held the man’s one-eyed gaze.

“What are you to us?” he asked, softly.

For the first time since Thomas had known him, the man who called himself Wednesday was the first to look away.

And somehow, Thomas knew, before the man called Wednesday even opened his mouth, that he was about to lie.

“This is not a game to us,” Thomas said, before that lie could be given voice, trying to school his own voice into an acceptable calm, not to allow it to rise with the anger that burned through him. “Lucille and I both have staked our livelihood – our very lives – upon this venture. If it is nothing more to you than entertainment, a chance to toy with us – if we are nothing more to you than unwitting pawns -”

“Never,” the man called Wednesday interrupted, with what seemed to Thomas a sudden and unnecessary fervour. He only seemed to remember himself and recollect his composure at the last moment. “You were never a – never pawns.”

There was something in the way he said it, some earnest note, something sad in the look he turned on Thomas, that made Thomas abruptly and causelessly uncomfortable, embarrassed on the man’s behalf. He cleared his throat, and the man called Wednesday looked sharply away. It seemed to Thomas that he retreated, in some indefinable way, back into himself, tucking his heart back from his sleeve into whatever recess he had hidden it away in until whatever unfortunate turn of phrase Thomas had employed had prised it out. When he spoke again, it was with the same detached authority that Thomas had grown used to.

It was too late, though. Whatever doubt Thomas had had of Lucille’s surmise had already been well and truly removed.

“Your parents were not kind people. Had I known sooner…” The man called Wednesday shook his head. “I have no thought of blackmail. Consider our business arrangement a debt repaid.”

Even as Thomas puzzled over the man called Wednesday’s words, the pieces fell softly into place in his head, their teeth interlocking one by one and the whole mechanism beginning, little by little, to turn.

“You said you had told us nothing but the truth,” Thomas started, slowly. “And you said you had never had an affair with our mother, that we are not your blood.”

The man called Wednesday frowned. “You still think I’ve told you a lie?”

“I _think,_ ” Thomas said, “you never said you were not in love with her.”

The man who called himself Wednesday looked, for a moment, as though he would argue, but then his gaze focused on something past Thomas’ shoulder and he seemed, somehow, to deflate.

“No,” he said, quietly. “I never did say I was not in love with your mother.”

Thomas turned. Behind him, Lucille stood in the doorway, in their mother’s old dress, her head high, back stiff, chin tilted haughtily upward.

“Breakfast is ready. I hope you like porridge,” she said, shortly, her eyes fixed on the man called Wednesday, before turning and sweeping away.

Thomas turned back to his guest, to see the man called Wednesday’s single eye fixed on Lucille’s retreating back.

…

The man called Wednesday left that afternoon, without his business deal completed. Thomas drove him back to the next town to catch his train, his trunk with its damaged lock in tow.

They drove in silence nearly the whole way.

“You do know,” the man called Wednesday said, at last, as the town came into view, “that my offer still stands. I wouldn’t want to see you do anything…unwise, for want of money.”

Thomas bit his lower lip. “I don’t know that I can take money from you. I have a feeling it would come with conditions I might not be able or willing to fulfill.”

The man called Wednesday didn’t answer at once.

“I only wish to spare you,” he said, at last, and for the first time since Thomas had known him, truly sounded old. “We do things, in youth, with the thought that we can make something good come from something ugly, that the ends will justify whatever means we must take.” He gave his head a shake, staring blankly out at the cottages that rolled past. “But all that brings in the end is more ugliness. I came too late to wisdom. I would save you from the same regret.”

Thomas had no way to answer that. He turned all of his attention instead to seeking out the turning for the train station, a turning he knew as well as the winding halls of Allerdale.

“Come with me,” the man called Wednesday said, unexpectedly, and Thomas jerked around.

“What?”

“Leave the hall to your sister. She seems happier there anyway, in her own little kingdom. Come back with me. Let me introduce you to some friends. I know you think you’ve exhausted your every resource, but – there are men, still, who listen when I speak.” The man who called himself Wednesday had a stare like a rapier, and Thomas found himself skewered, unable to look away. There was something ancient and unfathomable in that stare. “We both know you could be more.”

“I,” Thomas started, and then shook his head, unsure of what he himself had been about to say.

It burned his tongue bitterly as he confessed, “I can’t. Not alone.”

“She’s the worst part of you,” the man called Wednesday said, the scowl that crossed his face thunderous.

Thomas bit back his first, defensive response, just long enough to consider his words.

“Perhaps.” He managed to summon up a smile. “But then, as you say, she is part of me. And you can’t separate us out so easily.”

“No,” the man called Wednesday murmured. “It appears I can’t.”

Thomas drew in a breath, let it out again slowly, as he flicked the reins to lead the team around the turning. There was a chill beginning to gather in the air, nipping at the dry yellow grass dead all around them, filigreeing the windows of the humble homes around them with frost. Winter would blow in soon.

“And,” Thomas said, before he could think better of it and stop himself, “I would not wish you to.”

The man – man? – who called himself Wednesday held Thomas transfixed in his gaze for a moment longer, before he turned away.

“I understand,” he said, and did not speak another word until they reached the station.

…

“You never did tell me what you and your guest spoke about,” Lucille said, after, as she and Thomas lay together with sleep drawing close around them. It had been fast and hard and almost desperate, leaving them both exhausted and yet somehow still unfulfilled. They hadn’t been separated so much since they were both still children. They had both, Thomas thought, forgotten how to be without the other.

“It wasn’t blackmail.”

“No?”

“No.” Thomas stroked a hand over Lucille’s bared shoulder. “I – think he was genuinely acting out of a sense of obligation.” He paused for a moment, gripping Lucille’s arm perhaps a little too tight before adding, “He intimated that he had been in love with Mother.”

Lucille let out a very unladylike snort. “Can you imagine someone pining their life away for love of _Mother_?”

“I find it difficult,” Thomas admitted.

Lucille drew a lazy hand down his bared chest, drawing nonsense symbols with her fingers, a sparkle of bright mischief in her eye when she looked up at him. “I can only imagine what crossed his mind when he saw her portrait.”

Thomas bit his lower lip against the laughter which threatened to spill forth.

“We shouldn’t make fun,” he said, at last. “You and I, of all people, ought to have some sympathy for love which dare not show its face to the world.”

The spark drained from Lucille’s eye at that, and she lowered her head back down to Thomas’ chest, pressing her hand flat and warm against his sternum and her ear to his breast where, he knew, she would be listening to his heartbeat.

“I wonder if she was married when they met,” she said, half-dreamily.

“I wonder,” Thomas said, reaching down to stroke a reverent hand over the satin softness of his sister’s raven’s-wing hair, “whether she ever even knew.”

“How on Earth could she have not?”

Thomas stared up towards the canopy over their heads, the dagger-like spikes dripping from the ceiling beyond, his hand still stroking distractedly over Lucille’s hair.

“Do you think other people in love feel like this?” he asked, at last.

Lucille raised her dark head enough to meet his eyes. “Like what?”

Thomas turned his gaze away from hers, back towards the ceiling, towards the heavens. Towards where he could not see but knew, somewhere, there were distant stars. Where, somewhere, flaming bodies hurtled through space, falling, forever, alone.

“Like half of something whole.”

Lucille did not answer, for so long that Thomas began to wonder if she had fallen asleep. Then she reached down and twined her fingers through his, squeezing tightly enough to hurt.

Thomas wrapped his other arm around her, holding her close against him. He knew, without having to ask, that she felt as he did.

That, do what they might, it could never quite be close enough.

**Author's Note:**

> GDT’s unquiet dead clearly have foreknowledge of future events/exist outside of time (see director’s commentary; Mother Cushing’s ‘Beware of Crimson Peak’; Lady Sharpe’s ‘His blood will be on your hands’), and iirc the entirety of Voluspa is just Odin summoning up the dead for a sneak peek at the future, so…I figured Lady Sharpe might have been feeling chatty. Don’t know if Marvel kept that aspect of his character but it served my purposes so I don’t actually care.


End file.
